About eight years ago, the filmmaker Tom Gilroy bought a farm in Rensselaerville.

The farm came with a house that was small, he says. Very small. Extremely small. And what's more, it was "dilapidated ... parts of it were falling apart." But that tiny, rundown house became the perfect introduction to Hilltown living for the writer-director, who spent hours at the site with local workers: the glass guy, the driveway guy, all those guys.

"When I was there, I did a lot of the design work, fixing it up myself with local contractors," he says. "And it was while I was up there when I wrote the movie."

By that he means "The Cold Lands," his independent, introspective, beautifully shot study of a home-schooled boy named Atticus who bolts into the upstate woods after his mother dies. While trying to live out her mantra of self-sufficiency, he meets Carter, a toking drifter in clam diggers, and the pair drift together for a while.

The film's themes emerged naturally from getting to know his neighbors, Gilroy says. "The people at the post office, the people at the restaurant, at the Medusa General Store — all those people. You know, it's a small town. It's a very, very small town, and so you meet everybody really quickly, and you talk to them, and you find out what they think."

He'll find out more at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, when "The Cold Lands" screens at the Spectrum 8 Theatres. Also scheduled is a question-and-answer session with Gilory and Silas Yelich, now 14, who stars as 11-year-old Atticus and brings to the screen a pair of high cheekbones and a mature, old-soul presence.

Gilroy didn't have to look far to find him. "He lives at the bottom of the hill," the director notes. "I see him around. I'd seen his face — he always looked to me like a younger version of River Phoenix ... and I thought, 'Let's try this kid.'"

Yelich also appeared in "It Happened Today," an REM video that Gilroy shot in Rensselaerville. He took acting lessons and rolled into the movie alongside Peter Scanavino as the drifter and Rhinebeck resident Lili Taylor as Atticus' independent-minded mom. The film was shot about two years ago, most of it in Rensselaerville — and most of that within "a 10-minute drive from my house," Gilroy says.

"I'm a writer, so I just write what's around me. So I began to sketch out some ideas. I thought, 'Well, if I'm sketching them out, and it's taking place all around me, and I'm shooting around here, why not just put up the crew in my house? And after I did the REM piece I thought, 'Yeah, let's do it.'"

Sharp eyes will note the Greenville Drive-In and assorted spots in and around the Huyck Preserve, including Lake Myosotis — Gilroy lives next to it — and the Rensselaerville Falls. In an early scene, the boy and his mother stand at a historical plaque in Westerlo marking the 19th-century Anti-Rent Wars. Later, Atticus imagines the uprising tenant farmers dressed in hooded calico.

He imagines his mother, too. Or is she a ghost? Maybe, maybe not; Gilroy won't say, and more to the point, he doesn't think he needs to. "What I would say is, what's the difference?" Most films get too literal about these things anyway, he says. 'Is it a projection of your conscience? Is it memory? Does the ghost (exist)?' Why can't it be all of those things?"

"The Cold Lands" shares its touch of magical realism with another recent independent drama featuring a young protagonist, orphaned by fate, who strikes out alone into nature. But similarities with "Beasts of the Southern Wild" are purely accidental, Gilroy says.

Both films "exist against a background of a crumbling social system, and (they're) about a kid trying to survive without their parent, and the parent is very suspicious of government. And it's kind of shocking how similar our films are."

Gilroy, also an actor with "Damages" on his credits, made his feature writing-directing debut with "Spring Forward," the well-received 2000 indie featuring Liev Schreiber as an ex-con and Ned Beatty as the parks and rec worker who befriends him — another film about wounded souls who make an unlikely connection. His next movie, "Our Lady of the Snow," will be set in a convent. After that, another film shot in Rensselaerville. And in the meantime, he says, he sent out leftover footage from "The Cold Lands" to seven musical collaborators. Brooklyn band The Echo Friendly got Thacher Park; Michael Stipe of REM got the waterfalls.

But as much as Gilroy's work looks outward at the natural world, it also looks inward. Some of most affecting scenes in "The Cold Lands" involve Atticus and his mom, whose love for her son comes out in small, subtle moments.

"All that subtlety is Lili. Lili came in basically before the character was written, and she basically became the character," Gilroy says. "She's one of my oldest friends. And you know, when she's right, she's right. It makes it easier. It makes one less thing to worry about when you're directing an 11-year-old, you know? I don't have to worry about the mom."

Gilroy has no kids of his own, but he has plenty in his life, he says, and he's sympathetic with parents who want to peel them away from mainstream American consumerism. He likes the idea of teaching independence. "Is the mother a flawed character? Absolutely. But I do agree with a lot of the same things I want her child to embrace, yeah. And so do a lot of my neighbors, by the way."

On the other hand, self-reliance has its limits.

"How self-sufficient can anyone be in the modern world?" he asks. "I mean, here we are talking on the phone."